[Oberon] Trivialising formality considered harmful

[August Karlstrom]

John Drake wrote:
> --- August Karlstrom <fusionfive at comhem.se> wrote:
>>John Drake wrote:
>>>I've in the opposite 
>>>boat as you and can't comment much about OOC
>>>because I'm pretty much stuck in a Windows
>>>world.  (Wondering what it would take to
>>>run OOC under Cygwin?)
>>
>>I have successfully installed OOC under Windows with
>>MinGW (instructions 
>>by Stewart Greenhill are included in the OOC
>>package).
> 
> 
> Now that you mention it, I vaguely remember this.
> I have no experience with MinGW but could try 
> that out.  Were you able to get the VisualOberon
> library working with it?

MinGW is much more light-weight compared to Cygwin. Never tried 
VisualOberon though.

[snip]

> We have to be carefull not to put too much stock 
> in the Oakwood document.  It's not the 
> equivalent of "ANSI-C" but rather a set 
> of recommendations. 

OK, I see, you are probably right.

[snip]

> Sure, you can write your own compiler from
> scratch if you wish and make it 100% 
> Oakwood compliant down to every recommended
> library and extension.  If that's what
> you want to do, I wish you luck.  But
> I'm more interested in moving forward
> a set of portable libraries that people
> can use with the Oberon-2 compilers that
> already exist.  That means acknowledging
> the fact that names like "Files" and
> "Strings" are typically already taken.

Makes sense.

> So the challenge to day is to build up a
> library set that various Oberon programs
> working with various compilers and/or systems
> can find usefull.  I guess I'm not as 
> concerned about other people's perceptions
> of Oberon as I am with what I can do with
> it.  

Larger community means faster progress.

> I have the belief that "If you build
> it, they will come."  There's functionality
> that we don't have across all Oberon 
> compilers that we should have.  

Agreed.


August